Published 3:00 am Thursday, June 4, 2020
ST. PAUL, Ore. — Hazenberg Dairy, a family farm that was relocated from Washington state to Oregon by patriarch Henry Hazenberg, has maintained its sustainability through the years.
Henry is now 88. His son, Brad Hazenberg, 59, has been the primary operator of the 4,800-cow dairy — 2,200, all Holsteins, are milked — for the past 30 years.
All of the dairy’s cattle are raised on-site.
Brad’s son Brandon, 37, said his primary job is the “day-to-day operations” of the 600-acre dairy and its milk production, while brother Conor, 28, is in charge of planting and harvesting the feed crops, which include field corn and a ryegrass cover crop.
Henry Hazenberg still resides on the property near Brandon and his wife, Casey, a physician, and their son, Bryden, 4.
Conor and his wife, Dayl, a teacher, and their two children, Kieran, 2-1/2, and Rhys, 6 months, live on contiguous land. His mother and father, Brad and Lisa, reside nearby as well.
Brandon was a football coach and instructor at Linfield College for about 10 years, when he figured he had to make a choice.
“I was going to go into either coaching or dairy farming,” he said. “Not a lot of people have those two options.”
He chose a challenging life on the family farm, and he and his family are focused on the future.
“Our business model is a bit interesting in that we have a trucking business that is an entity of the farm,” Brandon said. “We have a big fleet of trucks, as we try not to pay a middle man on any of the trucking freight if we can haul our own.”
“We’ve expanded our entire dairy, which used to be up on a hill like most old dairies,” he said.
They are building out their feeding area and creating new space that will receive more waste food products such as malt, potatoes and corn and bean silage from area producers.
Brad Hazenberg said he’s always shopped around getting byproducts as feed for his cows at food processors.
“We feed everything, and a lot of the places just call us because they know we’re in the game,” he said. “We’re very environmentally friendly.”
“All the compost we generate every year for our bedding and all of that, it’s a real green initiative we try to do, to recycle our wastewater and our manure,” Brandon said. “We use separated solids and split it down with shavings and use it for our own bedding, about 25,000 yards a year.”
Hazenberg Dairy has about 45 employees milking, caring for the herd, feeding calves, working on the fleet of trucks, breeding cows and performing other duties.
Brad Hazenberg said because the farm is organized as well as it is, the winter months nowadays “are almost an 8-to-5 situation,” although three-a-day milking takes place year-round. Milk is contracted to the Albertsons-Safeway group of grocery stores.
